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[Infinity] Holy shit it took us seven years to get to 100 pages, but we did it!

Right, I posted this in the 40k thread, for reasons I'm not entirely sure about, but I shall repeat what I said in there.

I have noted that some of the models in the Icestorm and Red Veil were not particularly friendly to build, but I got my Beyond Icestorm box just before the weekend and they were a dream to put together. It is interesting to see how CB have gone about designing models because some of the earlier stuff is / was a complete nightmare to put together (I've given up on the zondcat tail), whereas in the last 2 years, they've come on leaps and bounds.

So I have a buddy that's starting to learn and we're getting into a couple of (small) games a week while he builds up the RV/RV:B sets (he'll be playing Yu Jing to my Ariadna). We've gotten a handful of games in and we've slowly added more rules, to the point where we're probably ready to start playing proper missions/objectives.

I threw together a "campaign" idea that's really more of a random mission generator. I took the Infinity Recon missions from GMG (meant for 150 points and one of the starter mats) and wrote a script that procedurally generates missions for us with the following variables:

Mission Type (duh)

Points cost (100-200 since we're still learning and don't have full 300 points yet)

A "time to live" of 1-3 turns for the mission before it expires and is replaced by a newly rolled one (more on this in a bit)

A possible tactical modifier to spice things up/force us to try new units and techniques

A campaign "outcome" should you successfully complete the mission

These get generated into a hex map (see below) and the idea is that we'd take turns choosing which missions to undertake, with a few wrinkles. First of all, you can only take a mission adjacent to a hex you control (red and blue tinted in the screenshot). Second, to "win" the campaign (and I use those words lightly) you need to successfully accrue Campaign Victory Points as the outcomes from missions. Third, to secure the outcome of a mission (e.g. +1 Victory Point, Capture a Tile, etc.) it must be your mission, meaning you chose it on your campaign turn. Each campaign turn will decrement a pip (the 3 dots) from all missions, and when they drop to zero the program will roll a brand new mission. The idea is that you ultimately want to secure missions that give you CVP, and to do so you'll need to control more territory (as it'll give you more odds of a mission spawning with CVP as a reward). It works pretty well in that we know in advance what mission/size/mods we'll be dealing with, so we can bring a new list each time to experiment.

Again, it's not much of a "campaign" but more of a random mission generator to force us to learn new rules and try new things with some structure. We may find that some of the modifiers are broken, the campaign map is awful, etc. halfway through and scrap it but we're playing small games and this seems better than just going down the list. I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions or concerns so far, and I do have some outstanding questions I'd like input on:

What table sizes correspond best to each points value? 150 on the mats makes sense to me (we played the full RV set which is ~180 on it and that's as high as I'd go). We have access to 2 starter terrain sets, so my thinking was that we'd do single mats for everything and both mats together for 200 point games.

What are your thoughts on the Modifiers that roll for each mission? Right now I have some that limit what you can bring (No use of camo markers, no impetuous, no AD, no multiwound, no infiltration) as well as things like giving a bonus to the active/reactive (on the campaign level) player. These currently have a pretty low chance to spawn on a tile, so I'm not super worried about balancing them, but are there any suggestions for more?

I have the idea of "reinforcing" a tile and I think the mechanic makes sense at the campaign level (adding/removing the Reinforcement of a hex is a potential mission outcome) but what's a good in-game bonus to that? Extra points? Bonus to initiative roll?

We're obviously still learning a lot of moving pieces at once here, but do you think this could be a fun casual campaign format for full sized games as well?

Cool idea. One suggestion I'd make is that nobody likes being flat out told that they can't bring the units they want. So stuff like no Camo tokens is going to piss off Ariadna players and hurt them a lot more than Military Orders or Morats.

If the site is still up look at Strike Zone: Wotan. That was CBs big narrative campaign event for the year, they had a bunch of special rules for the scenarios that didn't stop you from using anything but really encouraged building lists in specific ways.

Like a mission on a frigate where all models with Zero-G got airborne infiltration

There's a guy who does some good reports on youtube, Ash, of Guerrilla Miniature Games (I'll also note he plays a lot with the guy from Gaming with the Cooler if you want to see more batrep videos); he came up with an unoffcial way to play Infinity which was aimed at new players still learning the game.

It might be worth checking out his Recon! rules and seeing if you want to take any of his suggestions?

Here's a youtube video, which has a link to the rules in the description

@Redcoat-13 that's actually the mission set that I referenced in my post for generating the campaign map

@psycojester I'm going back and forth on the mods to be honest...as the Ariadna player, I wince over the "no camo markers" one but I'm also the one who put it in there. Especially at the low points costs for Recon, if we stick with our usual "auto-includes" I find that a solid ~100 points of the roster is always spoken for. I'm going to chat with my buddy to see what his thoughts are on it, if he's even remotely against it I'll find other mods to use (slightly more dense vs. slightly more sparse terrain, saturation zones, etc.) It looks like the Wotan website is still up, but I don't have a login (and can't get one) so I'm SOL when it comes to looking at the mods unless someone has them handy.

Given that they're camo markers and premeasuring isn't a thing in this game, what's the proper way to determine whether something's actually in activation range? I can see that towards the edge of the template, it's "iffy" and I'm not sure what the etiquette is. Do you say "wait let me check the template" thus basically informing your opponent it's a mine? Does a faulty trigger reveal (or detonate) the mine? Do people just bite their tongue and wait until they're sure the mine is tripped?

Given that they're camo markers and premeasuring isn't a thing in this game, what's the proper way to determine whether something's actually in activation range? I can see that towards the edge of the template, it's "iffy" and I'm not sure what the etiquette is. Do you say "wait let me check the template" thus basically informing your opponent it's a mine? Does a faulty trigger reveal (or detonate) the mine? Do people just bite their tongue and wait until they're sure the mine is tripped?

Technically waiting until you're positive is illegal because firing a mine isn't a choice on the part of the mine's owner, so if at some point you were supposed to trip a mine but didn't, you cheated.

Basically, get a good feel for the area of a mine, err on the side of checking sooner rather than later, and hope that CB will -- like every other tabletop games company -- finally realize that premeasuring should be allowed in every game.

It makes sense to me that you can't wait. I think it only really matters for Minelayer -- beyond that a camo marker that's dropped is obviously a mine, but it's still important. The template is apparently just over 8 inches, so I can't even use ZoC as an exact measurement. I googled around and apparently nobody else has this problem, so I feel like I must be missing something obvious.

Groups tend to come up with mutually agreed ways to get around it. At some point you need to measure the mines ZoC, and if it's just out, you've technically pre-measured which is cheating, and if you don't measure but would have tripped it, it's cheating.

Our tables tend to be packed enough with terrain that if you get within LoS of a mine, you're probably going to be in its ZoC, so we just measure whenever.

That's my experience as well. Usually the mine is either definitely in, OR by the time the mine has any chance of firing my opponent has either already discovered it, or my Minelayer has been revealed/discovered.

Yeah I figure with camo markers I always check for zone of control when models move at all near them, since you can check for ZoC at any time. That doesn't give away that it's a mine, either, since it could be a hacker or anything else that might want to fuck you up if you come within ZoC.

My 4 year old daughter seems to loves all this stuff; I don't let her play with the models apart from the Kaeltar box with the symbiomates, but when she's been a good girl, I treat her to letting her play with the mat and the scenery I've collected over the years.

My 4 year old daughter seems to loves all this stuff; I don't let her play with the models apart from the Kaeltar box with the symbiomates, but when she's been a good girl, I treat her to letting her play with the mat and the scenery I've collected over the years.

It's fine to let a toddler play with Symbiomates because no matter what happens there's no way for those models to get any more broken.

Tri-Optimum reminds you that there are only one-hundred-sixty-three shopping days until Christmas. Just 1 extra work cycle twice a week will give you the spending money you need to make this holiday a very special one.

Haqq doesn't get much benefit either, but neither of those factions have issues except in the most kill-heavy ITS events and a small buff to TAGs isn't gonna change that.

I like the changes. Both TAGs and single group lists were suboptimal options in ITS.

I run 10 model lists all the time with Haqqislam. It's not hard to run an elite Haqqislam list. Spamislam is popular because ITS made it popular. The only faction that struggles with Limited Insertion really is Ariadna.

Also, Maghariba Guard with D16 Multi HMG and D15 Heavy Pistols with a 360 Visor? Scarface with D16 Mk12's and a D15 Panzerfaust? Haqqislam benefits just fine from the TAG buff. Add to that the Paramedic pilot and Joe Turner, and they're looking mighty attractive.